Sometimes party loyalty asks too much.

We have all seen these circus elephants complete with tusks, ivory in their head and thick skins, who move around the circus ring and grab the tail of the elephant ahead of them.

The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment; but it is no less a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy.

Our deep spiritual confidence that this nation will survive the perils of today - which may well be with us for decades to come - compels us to invest in our nation's future, to consider and meet our obligations to our children and the numberless generations that will follow.

In our democracy every young person should have an equal opportunity to obtain a higher education, regardless of his station in life or financial means.

We cannot expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will talk sense to the American people. But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense. And the notion that this Nation is headed for defeat through deficit, or that strength is but a matter of slogans, is nothing but just plain nonsense.

All of us in the Senate live in an iron lung-the iron lung of politics, and it is no easy task to emerge from that rarified atmosphere in order to breathe the same fresh air our constituents breathe.